getting lost

The art of getting lost...seems like I am always in a hurry to get somewhere, be somewhere else, do something else. Who has time to get lost anymore? Rebecca Solnit wanders through the urban and suburban cultural landscape in her new collection of essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which appears to be a treatise on taking the time to roam and wander and just get ... well, lost.

Hitchfest

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the New Statesman review of Christopher Hitchens' latest book, Love, Poverty & War. Now I know that I should NEVER call him "Chris" if I meet him...

best characters in fiction

Who is your favorite character from fiction? NPR reproduced a list of the 100 Best Fictional Characters since 1900 and I must ask -- Hana from Ondaatje's The English Patient???? I'm not sure she would make my top 100 if I was asked to choose...

lovin' Lolita

Ok, I've got to admit, I felt some sympathy for poor 'ol Humbert Humbert. I'm almost done with reading Nabokov's Lolita, (two pages left for crying out loud!) and the novel is hysterically sad -- you may ask, "is there such a thing?" -- but try reading a novel about a delusional pedophile who goes to extraordinary lengths to get the girl of his dreams (albeit a 12-year old) and you, too, may want to laugh and cry. The obvious problem with this is that Humbert is a pedophile, so why would you feel sympathy for him? But he narrates the story with such obvious desire and this crazy sense of self-importance, not even realizing Lolita's a person, not in any conscious way, that you only feel sorry for him. Must find a copy of the movie and see how someone else visualizes the story.

do you know the most harmful books of 19th & 20 C.?

Apparently, reading Democracy and Education by John Dewey and The Feminine Mystique are harmful to you...

writer bio

Interesting article about writer Mark Helprin I found through Arts & Letters Daily today...

Shelby Foote obituary

Shelby Foote, noted Southern writer and Civil War historian, has passed away at age 88.
Read obituaries here: NY Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, International Herald-Tribune, Boston Globe, StarTribune.com, CNN ...